The making of an Obamacare management failure

In the days after HealthCare.gov went live, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough quietly dispatched Jeff Zients, a favorite West Wing fixer, to assess the operation and report back.

When Zients did, President Barack Obama learned the project was in worse shape than suspected — riddled with coding problems, management issues and communication gaps, according to a senior administration official.

Republicans focus on Obamacare

Major players in ACA site debacle

The story of how a technology-obsessed White House failed to head off a technological disaster may be as simple as it is mind-boggling to the law’s supporters. Senior White House officials claim they just never anticipated the magnitude of the problems that would unfold — there was concern, yes, but not an impending sense of doom.

The notion that Obama wasn’t clued in seems to defy logic, given the warning signs from both within the administration and outside it, the importance of the law’s success to his presidency and his own understanding of the power of technology. But ever since the troubled launch, administration officials have tried to keep Obama as far as possible from the debacle, describing him as engaged in the implementation but unaware of the depth of the website issues.

The question of how much the White House knew will get a fuller, public airing Wednesday when technology officials in charge of the website testify before House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Inside the West Wing, the explanation is that the things they were worried about didn’t turn out to be their biggest problem. Officials fretted over server capacity, rate shock, premium increases, the readiness of the state exchanges and driving traffic to the site — but not the fundamental health of the website.

Obama’s main line to the people working most directly on the project were his monthly meetings with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services director Marilyn Tavenner and other top officials, including White House chief technology officer Todd Park, who will testify Wednesday. They met more frequently in the weeks before the launch, and Obama pressed for unvarnished assessments, but the White House didn’t receive signals that a website fiasco was looming, aides said.

He tried to convey that his staff needed to bring problems to his attention before they spun out of control. Obama even told them that unless they got HealthCare.gov right, nothing else mattered. The response he got, aides said, was that it would work.

In the final weeks, White House aides often heard of flare-ups but they would quickly receive explanations for how the problem was resolved. They didn’t feel knowledgeable enough about IT issues to determine whether the solution was adequate, aides said.

A CMS spokeswoman declined to comment for this story.

In an Obamacare briefing for POLITICO four days before the launch, senior administration officials dismissed insurance industry concerns about the technology.

One official said during the briefing that he had learned a lot about software fixes and patches but that they were moving closer by the day to a good consumer experience. The official acknowledged that there would be glitches but that they felt very good about where they were on the operations side.

“There was a belief within the Department of Health and Human Services that the website would work and that the reports we were getting and others who strongly support the ACA was, sure, there were likely to be glitches,” said Ron Pollack, the founder of Enroll America, which has spent millions promoting the law. “But I don’t believe that anyone with major responsibility for the ACA implementation knew the problems would be as significant as they turned out to be.”

Yet there was palpable concern.

Two federal officials with direct responsibility for the federal insurance marketplace hinted back in March of a potentially dysfunctional system.